Intrigued by the many disparate views
of Cuba, Brân visits the country
of contradictions and, interweaving
history and current events, personal
and wider
viewpoints, she paints a vivid and
compelling picture of contemporary
Cuba. She finds
a land that has little in common
with the tourist image of tropical
paradise,
encountering a different country
whose people reveal an individuality
and tenacity
at once astonishing and humbling.
Brân has always been fascinated
by the gap between the ideals of the
world’s socialist countries and
the arduous hand-to-mouth struggles of
the people who live in them. Castro’s
Cuba is one of the last such places on
earth. Seeking to understand the realities
of Cuba today, Brân travels the
length of this beautiful island. Beneath
the surface of music and dancing, cockfights
and animal sacrifice, she finds a land
of complex ambiguities: a fertile land
where many hunger; an educated country
with scant knowledge of the outside world,
a nation exhausted by socialism but proud
of its independence and history of revolutionary
struggle. From Havana to the pastoral
hinterland, Brân talks with
writers and artists, with expatriates,
with committed
revolutionaries and those desperate
to escape abroad. Enduring Cuba presents
a kaleidoscope of Cuba and its people,
whose tenacity and endurance is at once
astonishing and humbling.
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